Parmatown Mall opened in 1956 in Parma, Ohio, roughly 10 miles south of Cleveland, anchored originally by Higbee’s and May Company, with a Kresge store serving as a third anchor until its early-1980s closure made way for expansion. General Cinema opened a two-screen Parmatown Theater in 1967, unusually large for its era, expanding to five screens by the 1980s before closing in 2001; a subsequent operator, Cinema Grill, briefly ran a renovated dine-in version of the same theater space starting in 2002.
The property was substantially renovated in the early 2000s, and in 2017 its enclosed interior was demolished entirely and rebuilt as an open-air shopping center, rebranded The Shoppes at Parma. At roughly 756,000 sqft, per PREP Property Group’s own figure, the property currently carries more than 50 stores anchored by Marc’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Walmart (occupying the former Higbee’s footprint) and Burlington, with one further vacant anchor space left over from a former JCPenney.
Chuck E. Cheese’s and Marc’s, both major tenants, occupy sections of the property that remained open-air even before the larger 2017 demolition, reflecting the site’s gradual, decades-long shift away from a fully enclosed format rather than a single abrupt conversion. PREP Property Group currently owns and manages the property.
That half-century transformation, from a 1956 enclosed department-store mall with a genuinely early two-screen cinema to a fully open-air power center under a new name, illustrates how thoroughly some of Cleveland-area retail’s earliest postwar shopping centers have physically reinvented themselves, discarding their original enclosed-mall format entirely rather than merely re-tenanting within it.
